WSS v2 Email Configuration Gotcha – Spaces in SMTP server names

This morning I was working on an issue for a client, to track down why alerts were not being sent out to subscribers within their WSS v2 environment. I checked all of the well known issues, such as making sure the SharePoint Timer Service was running, and also restarted it just for kicks. And that the accounts were the same for the Timer Service as well as the content database for the WSS server as well, so that the Timer Service can actually connect to the database and process alerts… and everything was just fine, however, alerts were still not being sent out.

Since we have an external server here which we use to process mail, I added in a few rules to allow my client’s server to relay mail through, so I can control every aspect of the process, and that is when I found the issue.

When highlighting the server name in the Outbound SMTP server configuration box to remove and replace with our server, there was an extra space on the end of the server name. This was the case for both the virtual server and central configuration SMTP settings. I dropped the space from both, and alerts were finally making it out of SharePoint, and onto their subscribers.

The environment which this occurred in was WSS v2 running with SP2. I will look to see if I can find a hotfix for this issue or if this is fixed in WSS v2 SP3.